When Judith Freeman was 22, she was working in the cookware department of the Mormon church-owned department store in the town in Utah where she grew up. She was living in her parents' house with her four year old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries, and she was in the process of divorcing her husband, whom she married at the age of 17. She had abandoned Mormonism, the faith into which she was born, and she was having an affair with her son's surgeon, who was married with three children of his own. She had decided she was going to be a writer. How, Freeman wonders when she looks back at that moment, did she get there? And how did she move on? The reader is given a glimpse, through Freeman's eyes, of Mormon culture and tradition, as well as of the ways in which our memories are constantly evolving, always subject to the force of our present. and forgiveness, of memory and hindsight, and of identity and self--the very stuff that makes us human"--

JUDITH FREEMAN is the author of four novels "Red Water, The Chinchilla Farm, Set for Life, "and "A Desert of Pure Feeling" and of "Family Attractions, " a collection of stories, and "The Long Embrace, " a biography of Raymond Chandler. She lives in California and Idaho."